Faithful readers of this column know that I’m always looking to let everyone know whenever an important figure in rock history comes to town.

This time it’s an English musician named Martin Barre, longtime lead guitarist of the British progressive rock band Jethro Tull. On Feb. 27 and 28, he brings his own Martin Barre band to Sweetwater in Mill Valley.

I suspect that many of you may be old enough to remember Jethro Tull. For everyone else, here’s a little background: As one of the most commercially successful progressive rock bands of all time, Jethro Tull has sold some 60 million records worldwide with 11 gold and five platinum albums. The band first came on the U.K. and U.S. scene with its second album, the blues-tinged “Stand Up” in 1969.

“A chasm opened up beneath me and I had to think quickly and very deliberatively what I was going to do with the rest of my life. It was traumatic,” says Martin Barre, far right, when Jethro Tull disbanded.

That was the first album that Barre played on, having joined the band two years after its founding by its wild-eyed, flute-playing front man, Ian Anderson.

It was the record that brought Jethro Tull to America for the first time. Barre, who turned 73 this month, fondly remembers sharing bills with Jimi Hendrix, Jeff Beck, Led Zeppelin, the Paul Butterfield Band and most of the major rock acts touring the U.S. during that extraordinary period of musical creativity.

Playing with the Dead

He still has a poster from a festival Jethro Tull played that year with the Grateful Dead in the capacious Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

“I remember the Grateful Dead played for four hours,” he says with a laugh, speaking by phone from his home on the southwest coast of England near Plymouth. “They played for a helluva long time.”

Like many baby boomers, I became aware of Jethro Tull through the 1971 album “Aqualung,” a huge hit, followed by “Thick as a Brick,” another smash, a year later. I was in the audience on Sept. 1, 2000, when Jethro Tull played a 20-song show at the Marin Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium. I remember chatting with Anderson briefly in the green room afterward.

Anderson had always been the star of the band, its eccentric front man, but it was Barre who came up with many of the riffs and chord progressions that made Jethro Tull tunes so distinctive, including the memorable lick that forms a kind of eerie leitmotif in “Aqualung.” And the solo he played on that song has become part of rock guitar lore, voted by readers of Guitar Player magazine as one of the greatest of all time. Guitar World magazine listed it as one of the 100 greatest ever. Barre’s unusual self-taught style has influenced generations of guitarists, from Mark Knoffler and Joe Bonamassa to Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Eric Johnson.

An albatross

Instead of embracing “Aqualung” as his calling card, Barre finds it more of an albatross around his neck. To him, it feels stifling creatively. He chafes at the notion that he’s expected to play it at every concert to please Jethro Tull fans.

“I didn’t play it for 10 years,” he says. “I don’t like the cheap shot of walking on stage and playing the ‘Aqualung’ riff. I’d rather play something people don’t expect.”

“At my age, I still have energy, I’m healthy at the moment and I’m still hungry to play music,” Martin Barre says.

Since about 60 percent of his band’s set consists of Jethro Tull tunes, Barr will occasionally mix it into the show, “when the mood takes me.” But he wouldn’t commit to playing it at Sweetwater despite my best efforts to guilt trip him into it.

“People might be disappointed,” he says in his gentlemanly British accent. “I don’t like to take the easy way.”

Jethro Tull worked practically non-stop for some five decades before Anderson pulled the plug in 2013, telling Barre it was all over after a concert in Munich.

“At the time it was a huge thing to happen to me because I had nothing to do with it,” Barre recalls. “I didn’t want to finish, but Ian (Anderson) told me he was tired of being in a band called Jethro Tull and didn’t want to do it anymore.”

The end was devastating for Barre. For better or worse, he’d been Anderson’s right-hand man for nearly 45 years. One reviewer lamented that for all that time he had been “criminally overlooked.”

‘Traumatic’ ending

“A chasm opened up beneath me and I had to think quickly and very deliberatively what I was going to do with the rest of my life,” he says. “It was traumatic.”

Recovering from the initial shock, Barre put together a quartet under his own name in 2014 and released the solo album “Away with Words.” He’s recorded three more Martin Barre band albums since then, most recently last year’s “Roads Less Travelled.”

Barre may not have seen it coming, but the break from Anderson has been complete. When Anderson launched a 50th anniversary Jethro Tull world tour in 2017, Barre was not asked to be part of it. Likewise, when Barre hits the road with an eight-piece band for a tour of the U.S. later this year, celebrating his 50-year anniversary as a member of Jethro Tull, it will be without Anderson

“He has a solo band and I have a solo band,” Barre says. “We live in different worlds, physically, emotionally, mentally. We’re going in opposite directions.”

What struck me about my conversation with Barre is his undimmed passion for music. Despite his age, he seems preternaturally upbeat, devoid of world-weariness or cynicism. He still loves touring and revels in playing for audiences on his own terms, secure in his well-earned reputation as one of rock’s greatest guitarists.

“I have a fantastic following of fans, and they’re my fans,” he says. “At my age, I still have energy, I’m healthy at the moment and I’m still hungry to play music.”

Longtime Los Gatos resident and San Jose State employee Theodore Erskine “Ted” Gehrke died Feb. 23 after a brief illness. Gehrke was born in Portland, Ore. on April 1, 1939 to Leonard and Eugenia (Taylor) Gehrke. He married Elizabeth Turner in 1967 and soon moved to the Bay Area. In 1972 he became San Jose State University’s Student Union Program...